Julia & Dragon

Random Occurrence

Julia vs the Dragon

If it hasn’t been abundantly clear, Chaos Theory is hugely inspirational for me. Ever since I read Jurassic Park (before the 1st movie came out) I loved the iterations as they appeared in the novel. My copy didn’t allude to what actual fractal it was, though. Later, in college, I took a class called Patterns, Puzzles and Mazes. I learned a lot about the functions and aesthetics of games, mazes, tessellations, and various other fractal diagrams among other things. At this point, however, I behaved more like an amateur scientist. I began exploring the Dragon Curve iterations in a purely visual sense. On my own, with cut outs of the first form found in Jurassic Park, I created for this class a fractal puzzle. Through this I began to rotate and reflect the form in order to proceed to the other forms present in the book. After a while, and some frustration, I figured it out and set out to disprove myself by checking the actual equations. I found out that even I approached these iterations from a purely visual and playful standpoint, I taught myself the principles of iterative elements, self-similarity, and other things. It probably helped that I also read James Gleick’s Chaos twice already at this point.

This piece has been notoriously hard to photograph. The antiqued black is glossy, and the metal is shiny. I did my best.

Naming

Decorative metal flourishes

A struggle to understand patterns that don’t make sense, and the visual principles of maths.

The thing that plagued me was I still didn’t know what this iteration was actually called, and only after my graduate career did I at last confirm it. I’m not sure what took me so long, but I also wrongly thought it was called the Julia Set. This felt off, though, but I proceeded to create the 1st iteration (get it?) of this piece. The binary spells out ‘Julia is the one’, but I was still ill at ease. Luckily, my google skills improved. After some intensive secondary research I confirmed the name Dragon Curve fit my favorite representation of Chaos Theory . So formerly a declaration of my confidence of the fractal’s name became a symbol a journey to understand this form and its name. With the final piece completed, I christened it ‘Julia vs the Dragon’ to encapsulate the conceptual struggle.

Randomness

At the same time the understanding and new title came to pass, I became involved with a younger fellow artist named Julia. We got along well, but it was brief. I feared she thought the original title, ‘Julia is the One’, declared of my affection for her. This was never the case though. The opposite may be the case, though.